[debatem1]

Disclaimer: I live in Seattle.

Since I was curious about the numbers, I went back and looked it up. Since June of 2009 (ie, the same time period) median housing price in Seattle has gone from $365,000 to $655,000. Numerically that's huge, but it's actually only about 7% faster growth than my parents' property-- a growth rate that most people here, including yourself, seem to view as unexceptional. This in a city that by all accounts is exploding in population and in the midst of a dire housing crunch which demands deregulation.

Don't get me wrong-- 7% is a lot of money. But it's an effect size that could easily be explained by simple profiteering, FOMO, construction cost increases, or any number of other local factors that have little to do with the regulatory environment. Paradoxically, it could even be caused by new construction, since new homes and condos typically cost more than the homes they're replacing.

None of this is to say that I'm 100% certain regulation doesn't play a role in Seattle's housing woes. But the difference in how these two situations are perceived should, I think, represent a warning about conventional wisdom in both places.

[pchristensen]

It's the 7%/yr for decades that really gets you. There are articles about San Francisco from the 80s about how it will become impossibly expensive and drive out longtime residents if they don't increase housing production. Multiply that shortage in construction by 40 years and you end up hundreds of thousands of units short.

Seattle is actually doing fairly well, considering how fast people are moving here. Washington had more people move there than Texas (at 4x the population) and a higher % of the population than Florida. There's no way to build housing fast enough to accommodate that without tons of greenfield, but we'll see how the next 10 years go.

https://www.insider.com/us-states-people-are-moving-to-2019-...

[debatem1]

Just to clarify: that isn't 7% per year. That's 7% per decade.

To make it clearer what I'm saying, my parents bought their house in South Carolina in June of 2009 for about $130,000. Last month it went at just north of $195,000. If you had done exactly the same thing in Seattle and were subject to the median growth in housing prices that home would have sold last month for $205,000.

It's not chump change, but it isn't a night-and-day difference either. What I think it underscores is the difference between the actual problem we face (homes here are expensive) and the symptom we expect to see from theory (demand has skyrocketed -> home prices are skyrocketing). Because we don't see the symptom predicted by theory, I have to question whether the remedy the theory calls for is appropriate.